Terrible news! Santa ignored all my letters asking for 2025 to be a year when no new videogames came out so I could catch up on everything I missed from the past several years. In fact, it seems like maybe someone else might have sent him a letter asking for there to be more big games coming than ever.
]]>Gentle reader, I have previously written exactly two boob-related articles in my life. One was a cheesy round-up of the best manboobs in video games for Green Man Gaming's long-vanished blog. It was published sometime in 2010, and IIRC, pre-reboot Kratos came out on top. I think/hope it still exists somewhere in the apparatus of Green Man Gaming, hidden beneath the retailer's veneer of respectability like a barrel of radioactive waste. The other boob article was a piece for OXM about Ken Levine saying that he wished people would stop fixating on Elizabeth's cleavage in Bioshock Infinite - a complaint we might consider slightly hypocritical, given the character's visual design.
Now it's time for boob article number 3: some modder has given 122 of the 150 Jokers in cardgame Balatro big chests. This extends from visibly human Jokers to Joker concepts that shouldn't, strictly speaking, have the capacity for boobage. The banana card has boobs, for example. The credit card card has boobs. Behold.
]]>Last June, Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players. November was a little rosier for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028. Then, on New Year’s Day, that number jumped to 11,900 players on Steam - its second highest concurrent besides launch. Soon after, they vanished. Who were these mysterious shufflers, flocking to the deserted, echoing halls of Valve’s disastrous flop like your mate who uses the word ‘liminal’ too much to a dead shopping center? Forbes, who first reported on the phenomena, don’t know. No one knows. Somebody might actually know but writing ‘no one knows’ makes it more dramatic. Let’s dig in.
]]>Quick, the world is in peril, your adopted daughter is under threat, and nearby villagers are being terrorised by monsters. What do you do? Oh, you're sitting down at a cosy table in the local tavern. You're playing a card game with a dude called "Aldert". The wind outside is howling, and so are the nightwraiths, but you're just sitting there. Playing another "cow" card. Okay.
Guess you'll be happy to learn that the Witcher 4 developers have more or less confirmed that Gwent will be making a return in the recently trailered Ciri-led sequel.
]]>Today’s advent calendar game is already inside your head, for this is not a game you stop playing, merely one you step away from between rounds. Even after you quit, it lingers on the edge of your awareness like a muffled bassline. It glitters in the air around you like a cloud of spores. It cannot be denied. It can only be…
]]>Tic-tac-toe, known to British people as noughts and crosses, is a famously boring game that is nonetheless often played by anybody with a sweet wrapper, a pencil and five minutes to burn while waiting for any form of public transport. It's boring because it's a "solved game" whose outcomes can be safely predicted regardless of where you place your first nought or cross, allowing the "perfect" player to at least draw their opponent. It gets played regardless because a lot of people don't know it's a solved game - specifically, young children you may wish to humiliate using your superior grown-up brain, because when you were a child somebody did the same to you.
How many twisted adults were born from the experience of being bullied via the medium of tic-tac-toe? We'd be better off without this game. But look! Here comes Tic Tactic to shake things up with a touch of Balatro.
]]>Slipways was the best grand strategy game I'd played in years, because it tossed out all the genre's micromanagement in favour of a strategy puzzle where all your exploiting, expanding, et ceteraing could be squeezed into an hour's play. That game began as a PICO-8 prototype by designer Jakub Wasilewski before being polished to a fine shine in its full release.
All of which is just lead-in to talking about Solitomb, a solitaire-based dungeon crawler in which you fight demons by building hands of playing cards. It's currently - heywaitaminute - a pay-what-you-want PICO-8 prototype by designer Jakub Wasilewski where "all money earned goes towards making the bigger version possible." Like Slipways, it already seems like a frightfully clever piece of design.
]]>The Elder Scrolls: Legends, the free-to-play card game set in Bethesda's fantasy world, has been removed from sale on Steam. Its servers will shut down for good on January 30th, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.
]]>I played Balatro for an hour, had a pleasant time, then uninstalled it. I know a trap when I see one. Perhaps you are made of stronger stuff than I am, however. Perhaps you like that monkey on your back. For you, there's a new free update, which adds a second set of themed card art to the game inspired by the games Binding Of Isaac, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley and Slay The Spire.
]]>After a hard day's editing articles about three Disco Elysium spiritual successors - each more politically outspoken than the last, in a kind of Sophisticated Pooh collage of escalating Marxism - I like to kick back with a nice chill game about Lovecraftian space monsters.
That game is Konafa Game's Starless Abyss - a roguelite tactical deckbuilder published by Descenders and Yes, Your Grace outfit No More Robots. It puts you in command of a fleet of upgradeable spaceships, who must chase away invading Eldritch aliens hex by hex... and also, hex by hex. This is both hex-based and a game in which you can cast hexes, you see. Oh, don't look at me like that. I had to distil several manifestos into an article half-an-hour ago. I need this.
]]>Tiny deck builder Combo Critters exhibits the winning combination common to both small games and radical breakfast cereals - it’s very crunchy, but also bright, sugary and moreish. If Thaddius Cornflakes had recommended struggling families play Combo Critters instead of eating Cookie Crisp for dinner, I imagine the backlash would have been far more reserved. Cookie Crisp tastes like like someone poured Splenda on a packing peanut fished out from a puddle. Combo Critters, though? Pretty tasty, and also free from Itch here.
]]>If the recent Frostpunk 2 left you - haha, wait for it, ah this is going to be great, I'm so pleased with myself - cold (!!!!) then why not run your eye over fellow city builder Technotopia. Developed by Yustas and published by Wall World and Beholder outfit Alawar, it casts you as an AI mayor, Iris, who is trying to create the perfect city in a world of social and economic calamity. A world of social and economic calamity that looks, nonetheless, rather pleasant. I like the art deco retro-future vibe.
]]>The beauty of cards is that they can be anything. You can slap together a working game with them in a couple of minutes. Take 12 blanks, doodle some faces and landscapes, and lo, you have a procedural narrative generator. Make some duplicates, invent a few rules and lo, you have systems.
Conversely, the great drawback of cards - especially in those roguelite deckbuilders people have been churning out since Slay The Spire - is that everything can be reduced to them. For example: last night, I played a round of Fungi with my partner, Fungi being a charming tabletop foraging sim in which you gather scrumptious chantarelles and boletus from the forest floor. This morning I resumed playing Breachway, out now in early access, in which you guide a starship through a series of wartorn solar systems, with battles unfolding as a turn-based exchange of cards corresponding to ship components.
]]>A week ago, while belabouring the nuances of Arco, I expressed a wish to play more bullet hell games with time freeze mechanics, the better to savour the intricacy of their projectile patterning. Now here's Moon Watch, a Vampire Survivors-ish pixelart shooter in which you have a watch that stops time when you stand still. Snug within that frozen instant, you're free to laugh in the gurning faces of the living dead while you idly choose and aim garlic grenades, stake launchers and bouncy ice comets.
]]>This one’s a very simple build at the moment, but neat enough that I wanted to shout it out. Near Mint is a roguelike deckbuilder where you advance through a tower fighting slightly stronger iterations of the exact same skeleton. Ok, nothing too captivating so far. The twist comes from the cards: someone’s left them in their Oodie pouch, spilt BBQ sauce down it, then stuck it in the wash before taking the deck out. Now, all the cards have split apart into three pieces. It’s name-your-own-price on Itch here, and it’ll only take you a couple minutes to get acquainted, but I’ll explain the gist below. Gist is a good word. Satisfying to say. Gist.
]]>MTG Arena lets players play Magic: The Gathering on mobile and PC for free, giving the classic TCG a much lower barrier to entry. In MTGA, you’ll build up your virtual card collection, create the decks of your dreams, and face off against friends near and far.
]]>I am torn between being deeply annoyed at the fact roguelike deckbuilder Bramble Royale: A Meteorfall Story allows me to poison skeletons, and actually finding it very funny. I suppose it would take an unnecessary amount of setup to lampshade that my dexterity brawler, Mischief, actually switches out her regular poison for bone-hurting juice when fighting skeletal undead. So, you get a pass for now, game. Here’s a trailer:
]]>Earlier today, Nic did me a great injustice by waving aside my suggestion that he write about Shroom And Gloom, because "I want to read you describing mushrooms in interesting ways". Nic, I have no interesting ways to describe mushrooms right now. I used up all the mushroom lore I've ever gleaned from real-life foraging when I wrote about Morels 2, and I spent most of that article whining about unicorns. The best I can do as regards Shroom And Gloom is to say that these Shrooms do indeed look very Gloomy, possibly because some mad human has wandered into their warren and is now stabbing and eating them.
]]>I recently moved to a suburban neighbourhood where there is lots of relatively "wild" parkland and a few raggedy patches of woodland. I like to walk in the woods around evening time, after a hard day of writing stupid listicles about Call Of Duty. Forests are a critical preoccupation of mine, actually - check this lumpen thinkypiece I wrote about Alan Wake 2 - but they're also spaces for retreat and reflection, where I can shrug off the angst and lose myself in the spectacle of sycamores and silverbirch, arching over the path. Except. Except that sooner or later I start thinking about the roots.
]]>Hm. Hmmmm. Right. So, what have we got here? There’s my Blood Donor card, which reduces the value of the hearts I play, but also heals me. That’s fine, actually. Reduced score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can pull my Tarot card, I'll deal damage with each heal, and I’ve already pulled two scratch cards for yet more quick damage. Now, if I can just pull a Jack, I can plonk down the King Of Space And Time for a brutal finisher. That’ll transfer everything on my side over to my opponent’s, forcing a bust for a nice final chunk of hurt and…
]]>My own experience with gambling doesn't extend much beyond the single time I won a few dollars at a Vegas slot machine then refused to play again so I could claim that I'd "beaten Vegas." My own very petty victory as the ultimate gambler aside, it's by and large an industry built on preying on the vulnerable, so it's no surprise that Balatro developer LocalThunk is so dead against ever seeing his poker puzzler used for evil that he's made a specific stipulation in his will.
]]>2024’s small but growing avalanche of games that trap you in a room with a nasty little freak continues with Arsonate, in which the nasty little freak wears a gasmask and wants to set you on fire. He wants to do this using cards. There are 47 of them - a forest of silhouettes, laid across the blood-stained table between you. Every turn, you flip a tree card to reveal a flame. When the flames spread to a player’s Tower card, it’s game over.
]]>Chaotic poker-themed roguelike deckbuilder Balatro quickly captured hearts and frazzled minds when it released earlier this year. However, nowhere in Katharine’s (RPS in peace) review does it address the one eternal issue: can it run Doom?
]]>Like many an addled follower of the games industry, I have recently fallen under the spell of Balatro, and especially, its jokers. The mechanics and overall presentation may be exquisite, but it’s the thrill of discovering another mutant jester modifier that has me lunging for the Steam Deck in my sleep. Well, now those jokers have competition: ducks. Step or rather waddle forward Placid Plastic Deck - A Quiet Quest, a quacked-up card battler which somehow takes inspiration from both the Pokémon series and Inscryption.
]]>Death Game Hotel came out last week - a comically gory game in which players play casino-style card games around a table and raise the stakes by betting their own limbs. It's a VR game, which is a break from the norm for White Owls, the studio run by Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro (then again, what is their "norm"?). It's also got a big multiplayer component, with lots of jovial bubble-popping and chicken-squeezing between the comedy blood spurts. And this taste of multiplayer mischief has Swery's head percolating. This game won't be his last dipped toe in the multiplayer ocean, he told us.
"In the future," said Swery, "I would like to leverage this experience to challenge myself with something new in the online multiplayer realm (something you probably haven't even imagined yet)."
]]>In theory I'm down to review Breachway, a roguelike deck-building space sim which is sort of FTL but 3D and with cards. The second I wrested this privilege from Ed Thorn's resentful fingers, however, developers Edgeflow Studio and publishers Hooded Horse delayed the early access release. Perhaps this reflects Hooded Horse's atypically forgiving, when-it's-ready approach to game publishing. Or perhaps they just hate me and wish to deny me things that might bring me pleasure. It matters not, because the game now has a new early access release date - 30th August 2024 via Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store. Catch a celebratory trailer below.
]]>Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.
Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.
]]>League Of Geeks are going "into hibernation". The Australian developers behind fantasy strategy games such as the animal-themed Armello and hellish remake Solium Infernum said that their remaining staff are going to take an extended break, and they're not sure "when (or if)" they will revive the studio.
]]>Update: Card Bard appears to be a copy of a game by another developer, Dire Decks by kindanice. Dire Decks was released in 2023 on itch.io and was well received there. Kindanice has pointed out the direct likeness between their game and the one released on Steam under another name. Yikes. Thanks to our diligent commenters for catching this. We'll try to find out more.
Original article: The onslaught of fun Steam Next Fest demos you can play right now continues and will not relent. Card Bard is a deckbuilding roguelike shooter in which your wee gunman is seemingly frozen in abject terror as little pill-shaped baddies creep towards him like bacteria on a petri dish. Good thing you have a hand of cards, each one showing how many bullets will bop forth from your body when you select it. It's surprisingly tough for something so pastel-paletted. I'm 10th on the leaderboard. You can probably beat that, right?
]]>Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that the word ‘book’ is actually an ancient Sumerian greeting, short for: ‘can I have that book back I lent you eight months ago you said you’d have finished in like, two? This is going to be another one of those, isn’t it?.’ Truly, language’s many permutations are a font of limitless wonder. This week, it’s Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption maker Daniel Mullins! Cheers Daniel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
]]>As genre mash-ups go, I didn't see this coming. But maybe I should have, knowing how once things like battle royales pop off, they will always spawn curious mutations. Inferni: Hope And Fear is one of these curiosities, being an online co-op, deckbuilding, battle royale, with a 90s theme.
]]>The developers behind Fable card game spin-off Fable Fortune and the digital adaptation of dungeon-crawling board game Gloomhaven have revealed a new upcoming co-op RPG… only to announce at the same time that the upcoming game’s development has been put on pause amid layoffs at the studio and difficulty finding funding.
]]>If you somehow haven’t fallen down the Balatro hole just yet, that slope is about to get a whole lot slippier. The mesmerising roguelike spin on poker is easy enough to lose an entire afternoon to by itself, but now it’s been combined with the granddaddy of all computer-related procrastination: classic Windows Solitaire.
]]>No one can see the future, but I've a fairly good sense of where at least 300 hours of my life will go next year. Slay The Spire II was announced during today's Triple-i Initiative stream, returning to the towering fantasy city where Steam says I've spent more than 300 hours building decks and battling monsters. While the announcement doesn't reveal much about the sequel, Slay The Spire is still my favourite roguelikelike deck-builder, so that's just grand.
]]>The deck-fixing roguelikelike poker of Balatro is chuffing excellent, no doubt, but my main criticism has been that the higher difficulty modes are just a bit boring. Having beat them myself, I didn't find them a fun or interesting challenge as much as an annoying one that required too much to go right. I'm glad to hear that they're being tweaked in an upcoming patch, which you can now test in a public beta on Steam, and even the lowest difficulty setting will be tweaked. Other changes include improved (hopefully) Steam Deck performance, balance tweaks, and better Joker-related Tags.
]]>Earlier today Tom Betts - founder of Nullpointer and former lead programmer at The Signal From Tolva developers Big Robot - emailed me about his new game The Horror At Highrook. In the space of a single, rollercoaster paragraph, Betts earned my curiosity by describing himself as a fellow Soul Reaver enthusiast, lost it again by criticising Soul Reaver’s camera - such insolence! - and earned it swiftly back by mentioning that he’s from Yorkshire. Then, he upgraded my curiosity into attention by describing The Horror At Highrook as a “clockwork narrative” horror experience that takes inspiration from Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft on the one hand, and from boardgames, wiki-hunting and escape rooms on the other.
This is a heady brew indeed. Also, there appears to be a cat in the game called Mr Tubbs, described as a “portly grey barrel of fur”. I entertain suspicions of Mr Tubbs. What fell secrets lurk behind his perfectly groomed exterior? Anyway, here’s the trailer.
]]>After letting you live out your Jason Bourne and John Wick fantasies by building decks and playing cards for close-quarters cool violence with 2021's Fights In Tights Spaces, developers Ground Shatter are venturing into fantasy-y fantasies. Last night they announced Knights In Tight Spaces, where you'll build decks with cards for turn-based tactical manoeuvres and magic-tinged action so you can bash baddies on small grids. Have a peek in the announcement trailer, below.
]]>The developers behind the wonderful tile puzzler Dorfromantik have revealed the first teaser trailer for their next game. Currently known as Project Mango, the game will be made in collaboration with the German animation and edutainment YouTube channel Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell, releasing in 2025. Not much is known about it right now, but come and have a watch of its teaser reveal below.
]]>In the run-up to Total War: Pharaoh at the end of last year, a slightly strange question popped into my head: "What if someone made a Total War game that also had the handsome anime looks of Fire Emblem: Three Houses?" Clearly, it was also a question on the minds on Japanese indie developers ThinkGames Inc, who have just announced their debut game Valiant Tactics EX. The 38-second long reveal trailer paints quite an enticing picture ahead of its Steam launch on March 29th, and that's not even the half of it either. For Valiant Tactics EX isn't just an anime Total War-like. It's also a whopping great deckbuilding game.
]]>I'm not surprised that I'm playing so much Balatro, because the deck-building poker game is fantastic and it seems just about everyone is playing it. What surprises me is that I'm playing in a way I rarely play roguelikelike games: launching enthusiastically into Endless mode. Turns out, what I want from Endless modes is an end. A brutal and hilariously sudden end.
]]>Today's the day of the RPS Game Club liveblog, where we'll all pile into a single article to talk, in real-time, about February's game pick, Cobalt Core. We'll be kicking off shortly at 4pm GMT today (Thursday February 29th), so go and grab a cuppa, switch on some appropriate music, and we'll get this liveblog started.
]]>Rocket Rat Games co-founder John Guerra remembers the exact day he started working on Cobalt Core's first prototype. He and his fellow co-founder Ben Driscoll had just spent a week playing Daniel Mullins' mysterious roguelike deckbuilder Inscryption at the end of October 2021, but the combination of a bad storm and a power outage ended up forcing Guerra to decamp from his home in Massachusetts and stay with some family until it all blew over. "I got back late on Halloween, just in time to put out a bowl of candy for some kids, and then the next morning we started Cobalt Core," he tells me.
The pair had been working on a range of different prototypes in the months leading up to this lightbulb moment. As development on their debut game, the spaceship building puzzler Sunshine Heavy Industries, began winding down, "we were throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall," he says, including games in 3D, a platformer, with Driscoll revealing they even had "a Terraria-like one for a couple of weeks" with a grid-based world that characters bounced around in. But it was playing Inscryption that brought everything to a head. Both had spent hundreds of hours with Slay The Spire, but "Inscryption proved to us that there was still a lot of space to explore in the genre," says Guerra. And with increasing calls from Sunshine Heavy Industries players begging them to let them fly the ships they were creating in its shipyard sandbox, "you can kind of see how that went from A to B".
]]>I seem to be on a highly irritating "refuse to play games as they were intended to be played" spree lately. A couple of weeks ago, it was "I refuse to leave the prologue area in Skull And Bones", a decision that has sadly been born out by Ed's review. Then it was "I refuse to play Helldivers 2 as a co-op shooter", which again, is a stance I am sticking with, even as I am overrun and sat on by Terminid Chargers. And now it's "I refuse to play Cobalt Core as a roguelike deck-builder, because it secretly isn't one". Come now, squint at the header image so that the text and numbers fade away, and all you can see are coloured shapes. Pay attention to certain underlying rhythms while playing. Need I say any more?
]]>The roguelikelike deck-building poker game Balatro is frankly the only game I care for right now. My head fizzes with ideas for fiendish combos and deeply illegal hands. I'm delighted by its deserved success, with the makers boasting that it sold enough to become profitable within one hour then sold 250,000 copies in 72 hours. In a recent interview, the developer claims that part of why it's so damn successful is because they've barely played other roguelikelike deckbuilders so it's free to do its own thing outside genre conventions. What's interesting to me in this is how Balatro has built on a game which did influence it, the slot machine-building game Luck Be A Landlord.
]]>Hello folks. With the end of February fast approaching, here's a reminder that we'll be diving into our reader liveblog discussion for February's RPS Game Club pick, Cobalt Core, this coming Thursday, February 29th, at 4pm GMT (which is 8am PT / 11am ET for our American friends). Looking forward to seeing you there!
]]>There's a little masochistic streak in me that croons with joy whenever I reach the moment of impending doom in turn-based strategy games. You know the moment I mean. The one where the world fills with enemies patiently bobbing and snarling while you try to conjure up an impossibly perfect set of moves that'll keep things going for one more turn? Cobalt Core is great at this. I've only played a couple of runs so far, but boy, you'd better believe I know when the end is drawing near. It's hard to miss, because the entire screen fills up with rows of damage numbers beaming down onto your hapless little spaceship.
]]>As promised last month, a new thing we're doing for RPS Game Club this year is asking you, our dear readers, what you think of each month's game pick in dedicated posts like this. Not just to foster some good old fashioned discussion among your good selves in the comments, but also as a way for those who aren't able to join us for the end-of-month liveblog session to still take part in what everyone has to say about it. We'll also try and stuff as many of your thoughts and observations into the liveblog discussion proper, too, to try and make it feel as communal as possible (and not just us waffling on about it for a full hour).
So, folks, tell us what you think about the excellent Cobalt Core below. What you like, dislike, your favourite moments (or your most hated moments)... Anything goes.
]]>Every year, there are a couple of game soundtracks I become properly obsessed with. In 2022, I more or less had the music of Tunic and Citizen Sleeper on repeat whenever I left the house. In 2021, it was Chicory. In 2020, it was Coffee Talk and Signs Of The Sojourner, and in 2019, it was all Mutazione, all the time. 2023 was a pretty great year for game music as well, as we not only got Alan Wake 2's exquisite musical set-piece that's honestly just been getting better and more insane as time's gone on, frankly, but also the toe-tappingly brilliant soundtrack of Cobalt Core, which has somehow risen even higher on my forever playlist after revisiting it for this month's RPS Game Club.
Composed by Aaron Cherof, Cobalt Core's music alternates between high-energy battle tracks and calmer, more relaxed ambience. It's so dang good, and an absolutely perfect backdrop for sliding in and out of oncoming missile fire in its roguelike spaceship fights. So come along and jam to some of its best tracks with me below as I pick out some of my musical highlights.
]]>There's a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it's cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds - small, big and boss - with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands - your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro's whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you're dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you've won a run of Balatro.
The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand's chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I've yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it's been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn't simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It's about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will - also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn't just encouraged in Balatro. It's damn near mandatory, and it's all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.
]]>If you've been enjoying the excellent Cobalt Core as part of this month's RPS Game Club, you may well have stumbled into Soggins the frog along your travels. Running into this hapless buffoon is always a delight in Cobalt Core, as he's one of the few special characters who doesn't instantly attack you on sight. Rather, the task here is always to try and save him from his own idiocy - namely, his malfunctioning ship that keeps firing his missiles right back toward him. He's an ungrateful little sod if you do rescue him from certain doom, but I kinda love him for it anyway - and thanks to an industrious pair of modders, you can now have Soggins join your crew to inflict his own special brand of personal chaos on you.
]]>You might remember Stacklands, a joyful survival village builder in which you stack and combine cards to craft and advance your society. WitchHand, which released this week, takes the same concept and applies it to developing your own witches coven.
]]>Moonbreaker, the unexpected collaboration between Subnautica developers Unknown Worlds and seemingly tireless human book machine Brandon Sanderson, has hit 1.0 after spending the last year in early access.
]]>Apologies if I'm starting to sound like a broken record these days, but here I am, back with another edition of "Have you heard about this cool new roguelike deckbuilder?" I swear I'll find a new/another niche one of these days, but listen, Pyrene is very cool indeed, and I lost a good hour to its free demo last week on Steam. On the surface, this might look like your typical fantasy dungeon crawler, but Pyrene has some neat tricks of its own, combining its own blend of resource gathering and roguelike citybuilding with Inscryption's number-crunching battles and a dash of Foretales' card-based exploration. And it has a lovely piano soundtrack to boot, too.
]]>Veteran trading card game and master of the heavily-kerned, overly-long monster name Yu-Gi-Oh! turns 25 this year. Among the card game’s quarter-century celebrations during an event in the Tokyo Dome this past weekend were a number of announcements, including the reveal of a collection of classic Yu-Gi-Oh! video games headed to Steam.
]]>RPS Game Club is back in action for 2024 today, and our first pick of the year is the exceedingly good Cobalt Core, a spaceship roguelike deckbuilder where you're slipping and sliding out the way of incoming missiles to get to the bottom of why you and the rest of your animal pals seem to be stuck in a pesky timeloop. I had an absolute blast with it when it came out at the end of last year, and really, this is just the perfect excuse to shove it back in front of your faces again.
]]>When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I'm just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I've had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro's demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you're into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who's never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let's face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that's turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it's coming out in full real soon, too.
]]>Veteran pen-and-paper RPG Dungeons & Dragons is getting its first official virtual reality game. Before you get all excited about being able to let Astarion bite your neck in first-person or shack up with a bear-shaped druid using hand tracking, know that it’s more likely to be a virtual reality experience emulating the original experience of rolling dice on a tabletop. Still, that’s what imaginations are for, right?
]]>After a successful first outing, RPS Game Club is returning for another year of gaming show-and-tells, and this time, we're publishing the schedule in advance so you know exactly what's coming up and when. Handy, say, if you want to keep an eye on certain sale prices for games you've got your eye on, or you want to clear your calendar so you can join us for our end-of-month liveblog session where we all get together book club-style to talk about the month's pick. Each member of the RPS Treehouse is getting involved this year as well, so read on below to find out what's on the Club docket.
]]>Hey! How would you like to contribute to the downfall of society? I do so by regularly tuning into Love Island and/or Married At First Sight. For those of you who'd like to do your part in videogame form, dev_hell looks to be the answer. It's a first-person deckbuilding roguelike where you play as a software developer employed by a shady corporation to "reshape the future", and it's giving off strong whiffs of Inscryption. As much as I know dev_hell will be incredibly unsettling… I'm in.
]]>Combine the turn-based mech battles of Into The Breach with the rule-changing puzzling of Baba Is You and you have Mobile Suit Baba, whose launch I entirely missed right before Christmas. Pick a squad of mechs to field in different scenarios where you must push, pull, and slam your way to victory. All of which will be so much easier if you rewrite the rules by shunting around syntax blocks. And yes, Baba is piloting a giant Baba-shaped mech.
]]>The two best parts of a Choose Your Own Adventure book are when you initially feel out the shape and paths at the start, and then when you grow tired of dead-ends and faff and just start cheating. The same seems true for Reigns: Three Kingdoms, the latest in the decision-making story series, which arrived on PC (and Switch) yesterday after a year exclusive to Netflix's inexplicable library of mobile games. Once again, you will decide the fate of a kingdom (this time, China) by swiping left or right on binary decisions. Unfortunately, you cannot cheatily flick through to interesting parts nor use your finger as a bookmark. Not even if you jam it into a USB port. I did try.
]]>Reigns is a kingdom management game which boils narrative choice down to its simplest form, by presenting the player with a long series of binary choices they swipe left or right on. From that basic interaction, it spins enjoyable yarns with some strategic underpinnings.
It's had several followups and spin-offs since, and it's about to get another. Reigns: Three Kingdoms, which lets you swipe your way through anccient China, will launch on January 11th.
]]>The first week of January is always one of my favourite times of the year. It's a time for making plans, setting goals, thinking about all the cool new games I'll be playing over the next 12 months (while also looking nervously at the pile of games I missed over the last 12 months and placing them very, very gingerly on the teetering and totteringly tall pile of my backlog). And, of course, making some new year's resolutions. Traditionally, I don't often set myself too many resolutions - I always give myself a reading goal (35 books is what I'm aiming for this year), for example, but the rest I usually play pretty fast and loose with - more 'nice to haves' rather than 'musts', I'd say.
This year, though, I do have a few gaming-related resolutions on my list, and in discussing them with the rest of the RPS Treehouse, it turns out we all have some games-themed goals this year. So I thought it would be fun to share them with you all below. And if you've also made some gaming resolutions for 2024, tell us about them in the comments. We can hold ourselves accountable together, like that big curtain of eldritch eyeballs up there in the header from good game Norco.
]]>Slay The Spire mod Downfall suffered a "security breach" on Christmas day which allowed hackers to distribute malware through Steam, the developers of the mod say. The malware attempts to steal users' passwords from their internet browser, as well as passwords for messaging services Telegram and Discord.
]]>These are salad days for fans of novelty golf, from What The Golf? to Desert Golfing to Turbo Golf Racing. Released in 2022, Cursed To Golf set itself apart from the mini genre by being a golflike roguelike - and it's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.
]]>In a year as stuffed with great games as this one, it was always inevitable that lots of very good ones would be left on the cutting room floor of our Advent Calendar this year. It's also perhaps no surprise that in the big spreadsheet of games I've played this year, I've set yet another new record for things I've played to completion. At time of writing, my list stands at 58 games for 2023, and by the time you're reading this in your post-Christmas lunch coma, I wouldn't be surprised if it had risen further. 58! That's more than one a week! Honestly, what was past Katharine thinking? No wonder I'm so chuffing tired right now.
In any case, my list of honourable mentions is so long this year I've taken the cheeky liberty of cramming some extra entries into my 2023 Selection Box, bringing you five more personal picks that I think are just smashing and that you should absolutely play when you get a spare moment or three.
]]>I don't tend to write up Steam bundle discounts, but this is a rather good one. As the name suggests, LudoNarraCon and Fellow Traveller's Story-Rich Megabundle nets you 10 well-received narrative-heavy games for around £20, €23 or $25, including three games I'd personally say are among the choicest chunks of digital scribble to ever grace an SSD.
]]>Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by games touching on chat around GTA 6 and Furiosa, along with spaceships, fungal horror, and the developer's dog. Come admire all these attractive and interesting indie games!
]]>Marvel Snap developers Second Dinner have reassured players of the digital card game that it will continue to “operate and flourish in the future”, in the wake of reports that publishers Nuverse are set to step away from the mainstream games space.
]]>Videogames are full of loops. Often, the loop isn't just a loop in space but a loop of labour, a loop in time. It's a repeated task with a touch of variation from cycle to cycle, typically associated with a character progression system of some kind. The classic one is the town-dungeon loop in an action-RPG such as Diablo 4. You sally forth into the depths with sword and shield, slaughter a bunch of blameless goblins, then orbit triumphantly back to the village square with its 24/7 forge and bustling adventurer's guild. Then off you go, once again, with a Sword +1 and a shield now bearing a Goblin Magnet. There are straightforward equivalents in multiplayer, especially in the wake of Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - sign in, play a few matches, harvest some XP, unlock a new laser sight, equip it, play a few more matches with +5% to your aim.
]]>Humble Games, the Humble Bundle-owned label responsible for publishing indie hits including Slay the Spire, Signalis, Unpacking, Temtem and this year’s recently Grammy-nominated RPG musical Stray Gods, have confirmed a number of layoffs.
]]>“To be a good designer, you have to have very, very strong opinions,” says Slay The Spire design lead Anthony Giovannetti. “Show me a game designer who gives a thumbs-up to most things, and I suspect that’s probably someone who doesn’t have a very good game design sense. I want someone who really, really loves and hates things, and gives you reasons why.”
It’s a trait which Giovannetti has in common with his Megacrit co-founder, Casey Yano, and has possessed ever since he was a kid growing up in Woodinville, 30 minutes outside Seattle. It’s matched by a competitiveness that first emerged in Warhammer 40,000 tournaments as a teen. Before he was old enough to drive, Giovannetti would ride his bike to the local game store and play until the early hours of the morning.
]]>If there's one genre I've never quite had the reflexes or spatial awareness for, it's the bullet hell shooter. I've long admired their intricate dances of orbs and criss-crossing laser fire, but I have long resigned myself to merely being a spectator of such games, rather than an active ship pilot. Cobalt Core, however, is exactly my kind of speed. It's not a bullet hell shooter, but it is about two spaceships facing off against each other in an eyes-locked duel of incoming cannon fire, and sliding side to side to avoid getting exploded as you attempt to unravel the mysterious timeloop your crew of weird space animals appear to be stuck in. Just, you know, in a neat, turn-based fashion, where your opponent's attacks are flagged up in advance, and you must use your randomised deck of cards to weave and dodge your way to victory. It's very moreish, and very Into The Breach. I love it.
]]>Recruit an army of soldiers, accountants, demons, dogs, dog-catching robots, nanite grey goo, zombies, priests, slimes, whales, fires, nuclear bombs, vampires, and other oddities to liberate the United States in Million Monster Militia. It's a roguelikelike deck-building strategy game where you draft units who drop onto a grid in random positions, enabling all sorts of abilities and combos depending on where they all land. It's kinda like the roguelikelike slot machine Luck Be A Landlord dressed for a Halloween party in a turn-based tactics costume. Million Monster Militia is ropey in its current early access stage, but I have enjoyed discovering weird builds and I am cautiously curious about its future after some updates.
]]>Back in the glorious Xbox One years, when every Microsoft executive was engaged in the act of putting one foot in their mouth while shooting it simultaneously, there was a giddy period of marketing conducted by means of Phil Spencer's T-shirts. He'd rock up on E3 stages like a cabaret dancer, touting tees with various new or elderly videogame licenses on them, and whipping older fans into a frenzy of speculation as to possible remakes or sequels. I myself had to go lie down after seeing Phil in a Phantom Dust shirt. Teaser-shirts, we should have called them. Look at him in the picture up there, showing off a chestful of Hexen. Shameless!
Sadly/happily, those halcyon days are behind us, but Phil still loves to dangle the carrot of an ancient IP now and then. Speaking on the Xbox podcast last night (while sporting a boring Halo championship jacket), he suggested that Microsoft could do more to revive their older franchises. Or at least "revisit" them in some fashion.
]]>I do love a game that tells you upfront what it's about while making nary a lick of sense, and visual novel Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful is certainly that. You are, indeed, being buried alive. The person burying you is your girlfriend, who waves aside your protests that you aren't dead yet, pointing out that this is exactly what a dead person would say if they were trying to avoid being buried. Can't fault the logic.
Click the downward arrow below the animated image of your girlfriend burying you alive and you'll discover a murky fungal blackscreen where cartoon rats periodically try to eat you, unless you click to get rid of them. Below that, there's a kind of Alice in Wonderland-style alcove in which a tousled lady with a rat on her shoulder reassures you that being buried alive ain't so bad. As she points out, "underground is like, the only place to escape capitalism, plus it's nice and cool". Again, I can't fault the logic. Then she offers to play cards with you. The cards in question have rats doodled on them, including a wonderfully festive rodent Joker. There is passing mention of a "rat god".
]]>There was a time back in my school days when cardgames were all the rage. Everybody had a deck of playing cards in their pocket for cheeky 15 minute rounds of Texas Hold 'Em between lessons, with Milky Way segments and Niknaks wagered in place of chips. Yes, I'm aware I'm starting to sound like Grandpa Simpson, and no, this wasn't from some murky era before the invention of videogames. It was the heyday of the Gameboy Advance! I'm not sure what we were thinking. But two things: 1) decks of playing cards are cheaper than game consoles, and 2) part of the fun, possibly, was that nobody really knew how to play the ostensibly well-known cardgames we were playing.
With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect there may have been creative liberties taken with the rules at times. I knew hair-pulling wasn't a legal move in professional poker. Anyway, I'm reminded of all this by Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, a warped and mildly satirical, 90s-styled take on Blackjack from Purple Moss Collectors.
]]>You may have noticed a mounting squabble between Starfield fans and detractors concerning the game's planetary maps, triggered by some leaks or fake leaks over the past week. Said skirmish has now escalated to "-gate" status, with "Tilegate" doing the rounds on forums and even creeping into search results, presumably much to the alarm of innocent, unaligned ceramics company Tilegate Trading Llc in Florida. The nub of the dispute seems to be thus: some people claim the procedurally generated tiles that comprise many Starfield environments actually glue together into complete globes, so that you can see and walk from one to the other and, indeed, all around the equator, while others claim they're discrete maps with invisible walls, similar to those of the astonishing "dreamable" space sim Noctis.
Who knows, we might have an under-embargo Starfield review in the works that will lay matters to rest. In the short term, the uncertainty about whether Starfield's planets are actually planets puts me in mind of comparable celestial angst in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games, where planets are more properly described as planes of existence, conjured by immortal beings, which sort of orbit the mortal world of Tamriel. I've been revisiting how Bethesda's mainstay fantasy games thought about outer space in the run-up to Starfield, and while I'm intrigued by the new game's portrayals of celestial mechanics (latest discovery: the Starfield starmap represents stellar and planetary gravity as dimples on a kind of galactic tarpaulin, as in old Stephen Hawking documentaries), I'll be very surprised if it offers anything quite as wonderfully bizarre.
]]>Alice0 has a habit of introducing me to weird and slightly frightening games featuring brutalist architecture. Well, not a habit exactly, but it's happened three times now, which is enough to make it a thing. Fugue In Void, by Moshe Linke, is technically and literally a walking simulator, in that you are going for a walk and that's all you do in it, but what it simulates you walking through is kind of a surrealist nighmarescape of raw concrete. I know I'm supposed to be making this game sound like something you'd want to play. Honestly, it's very good.
]]>I started with cats. They lapped up all the milk I could get them, earning me splatters of coins plus a further boost from a lucky early beastmaster. I threw some toddlers in too, basking in bonanzas of candy whenever I found a pinata for them to bash open, along with a smorgasbord of chests, fruits, urns and eggs. Then I slowly swapped all of that out for gems, and my board became a pristine, soulless, basically fully optimised money printer.
Luck Be A Landlord is about meeting ever escalating rent demands by playing a slot machine. Each month gives you a limited number of spins to come up with the money, and the chance to add one of three random symbols after each spin. Those symbols bounce off each other in zany but logical ways: bees pollinate flowers, comedians amplify monkeys. Dogs befriend humans. Billionaires get guillotined.
]]>"Tanuki" and "postman" are the two magic words to get me excited about any video game. Tanukis are cute and mischievous. Posties get to participate in adrenaline-inducing activities like meeting new people. Combine the two and that's your pitch for Project Tanuki, the codenamed next game from the creator of the great Cursed To Golf. Check out the brief teaser below.
]]>Following the lush card battling of last year’s Foretales, developers Alkemi are now trying their hand at an entirely different genre with An Ankou. The top-down roguelike casts you as the titular servant of Death, reborn and forced to continue working in the afterlife, mainly through killing demons and helping lost souls. Capitalism, eh? Lay your eyes on the reveal trailer below.
]]>We already knew the folks behind Slay the Spire mod Downfall were making their own standalone game, Tales & Tactics, and now we know when we’ll be able to play it. Tales & Tactics, in case you’ve forgotten, is best pitched as a mixture of Slay the Spire and Dota Auto Chess; in other words, it’s a fantasy roguelike (like StS), where you can pick up abilities, gear and whatnot during each run, with auto-battling combat (like Auto Chess) - except here it’s on a hex board.
]]>I gave up on the very last misssion of Marvel's Midnight Suns because I found the finale too gruelling, but all you clever eggs who finished it might be interested in today's update. Along with some fixes and quality of life updates that apply to the whole game, you can now tweak your New Game+ settings to customise what progress you bring into your next stab at Lilith. Want to not be friends with anyone anymore? Now you can!
]]>Get ready to bam, biff, and snikt through a new form of ritual combat, as Marvel Snap's new Conquest mode will launch next Tuesday, the 13th of June. That's hot news today fresh from Geoff Keighley's Level Up Pool Party. Conquest is a single-elimination tournament challenging you to climb tiers of the competition to win prizes, including a shot at a prestigious cosmetic at the end of the season.
]]>Everyone's favourite hunny-yellow bear will mutate into a fleshy horror bristling with extra arms and eyeballs and glands in Winnie's Hole, the next roguelikelike dungeon crawler from Ring Of Pain developers Twice Different. The earliest Winnie-the-Pooh stories are no longer under copyright in the US, see, meaning people can do whatever they want. Including this. Inevitably including this. Come see the horrible Pooh and his hole in the announcement trailer below.
]]>Out of all the roguelike deckbuilders that have followed in Slay The Spire's footsteps, Wildfrost is my second favourite. The cardplay never quite reaches the dizzy heights of Spire or Monster Train, but it's far cuter than either of them and still absolutely splendid. Now's a great time to pick it up, too, because its first big update is primarily aimed at clarifying rules to help new players avoid all the painful deaths I suffered through.
Developers Deadpan Games have released a roadmap, too, revealing a rough plan for what they're working on next.
]]>Amazon Prime subscribers can claim 13 free games during the month of June. Well, at no extra cost to their Prime subscription, anyway. That’s on top of the recently announced extras that are available for the next few weeks, including Turnip Boy and Calico. But next month’s lineup of freebies - which includes the ever-lovely SteamWorld Dig 2, Neverwinter Nights and Autonauts - starts on June 1st, with more free games being made available every single week after that, so be sure to check back every Thursday.
]]>I have a soft spot for Overdungeon, a maximalist real-time mashup of tower defense and collectible card game, and I sang its praises three years ago. Its developers, Pocketpair, haven't updated it since, instead pouring their work into similarly expansive "everything game" Craftopia and the Pokémon-alike (but with guns) Palworld.
Now Pocketpair have released a content update for Overdungeon and say that previous radio silence was because they were "a bit tired and struggled with our contract with the publisher."
]]>Magic: The Gathering Arena was released in 2019 as a (better) digital adaptation of the decades-old physical trading card game. Our review deemed it a success for its ability to make untapping and cycling graspable for newcomers and for its adoption of HearthStone-style attack animations.
Previously it's only been available as a download from its own website, but now Wizards say it'll come to Steam on May 23rd.
]]>Wildfrost is excellent at creating moments of triumph. Early on in my playthrough while I was still getting to grips with the game, I came face-to-face with a boss who got stronger when hit. Its card art had become bigger, juicier, more tauntingly malevolent, and easily could have taken out any of my team with a single hit. Thankfully, three of my team members were due to act one turn before it. The first chipped away a little of its health (its job was mostly healing) but the next doubled a stacked debuff that I had set up and turned the goliath into a giant bomb, and the effect of my two cards combined was just enough to trigger it. BOOM! My backline leader didn't even need to lift a single finger.
Playing with turn order and setting up synergies is a key part of how Wildfrost plays as a roguelike deck builder. Each individual card on the stage is part of a counter system, with both delaying and advancing them on the playing field being strategic choices. Some actions are free, like moving your cards around the stage or withdrawing them for healing, but playing cards out of your hand or shuffling your deck will pass the turn.
]]>Layer up with your thickest snow coat and a pack of cards because Wildfrost is coming to PC soon, on April 12th. One of the standout games we played at last year's EGX, this roguelike deckbuilder has a healthy dose of Slay The Spire about it as you venture out to defrost an eternal winter, battle baddies, and expand your card collection with elemental items stronger, cuter companions and elemental items.
]]>Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>Director Jake Solomon is leaving Firaxis after two decades of work on Marvel’s Midnight Suns, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and XCOM 2. This comes amid a studio shakeup with multiple senior roles sliding around the corporate conveyor belt. Firaxis also revealed that they’re in early development on the next Civilization game.
]]>Spidey’s occasional rival and everyone’s favourite symbiote Venom is swinging into Marvel’s Midnight Suns as DLC on February 23rd. Venom was a villain in the base game, but he’s now transitioning into a playable antihero for the fight against Mephisto. To celebrate, the deckbuilding strategy game is free to try on Steam for the entire weekend.
]]>Although the demo is relatively short, I’ve really been getting into the roguelike deckbuilding of Dungeon Drafters. I like the colourful pixel art, the classic fantasy enemy archetypes, how spell cards feel super punchy when activated, and I love love love the magical, fluffy wizard rabbit.
Called The Explorer, this rabbit is not only super cute - his little brown booties are adorable, as is his helmet which has holes so his massive fluffy ears can poke through - but a bonafide badass in magic casting. This rabbit can majorly throw down.
]]>Marvel Snap is several rare things at once: a licensed superhero game that's fun; a card game that's graspable and allows for casual play; and a free-to-play game that doesn't feel warped by microtransations.
As of today, it now has a PvP battle mode to enable friends to pit their decks against one another. It's either making a good thing better, or it's the beginning of the end of all the things I mentioned above.
]]>It's been a hot minute since the papercraft Diablo-like Book Of Demons last stomped through these monster-infested halls, but developer Thing Trunk are back today with news of the next chapter in their dungeon-crawling fantasy series. Hellcard will continue the story of Book Of Demons when it launches into Steam early access on February 16th, but instead of slicing up devil flesh in traditional hack and slash fashion, this time you'll be building decks of cards to tackle each dungeon layer as a roguelike.
]]>Shang-Chi is a card in Marvel Snap that destroys any and all opposing cards in his lane with a power of 9 or above. He feels great to play, and miserable to play against. He is also, apparently, quite bad - at least according to project lead Ben Brode, who's consulted his big statistics bank to discover that he appears in more losing decks than anyone else.
Huh. I suppose I can stop agonising over whether he has a place in my latest Patriot deck.
]]>Marvel Snap is excellent, and when you first start playing it chucks new cards at you faster than a confused magician. That slows down once you've got a few hours under your utility belt, but developers Second Dinner have some changes in the works that should make rarer cards easier to snag. If you're saving up for a particular card from the Token Shop, it's worth checking whether it's one of 9 cards that are about to get cheaper.
The first "Series Drop" is due to land in an update on January 31st, which will also add a mode that lets you battle your buds.
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![קודי Blox Fruits [דצמבר 2024]: Free Beli ו](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/roblox-blox-fruits.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי Blox Fruits [דצמבר 2024]: Free Beli ו")
